Disney in June is, well… DISNEY IN JUNE. It was hot. It was crowded. Although it was kind of refreshing to realize that I won’t HAVE to do The Disney again until Kaly has kids, and said kids are old enough to grind into her wallet for $25 tshirts and four dollar Minute Made Frozen Lemonades.

If my estimations are correct, I’d say I won’t have to worry about that for [at least] twelve years or so. Minimum.

My “Oh-Hell,-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here” moment happened as we were standing in line to ride the Thunder Mountain roller coaster. We were in the middle of the queue, the queue was in the middle of this barn, the barn was in the middle of the park, the park was in the middle of Florida, and oh, did I happen to mention it WAS the middle of June? The thermometer on my fancy-smancy Nike dive watch was registering 101 degrees ON MY WRIST!**

The crowd and the heat were not the critical components in my breakdown. The catalyst? The catalyst was the waves of vomit I kept choking down from the Big Assed Disney Breakfast BuffetÂ® I had wolfed on just an hour earlier.

To my credit, I didn’t eat anything else, seriously– nothing at all the rest of the week, and that Big Assed Disney Breakfast BuffetÂ® incident was on Tuesday. I’ve only had an orange Tic Tac, a popsicle and an Exlax since we got home yesterday. Seriously, I swear. To God.

And speaking of getting home, and swearing to god… Our house got broken into while we were gone. “Broken into” sounds a lot more dramatic than saying a couple of Kaly’s teenage friends decided to sneak in and check the place out. Although when I questioned one of the boys about coming into the house, he promised he didn’t do it. As a matter of fact, he said, “I didn’t. I didn’t do it… I swear.

[insert silent pause that I let lapse for a good 45 seconds]

To God.”

He fessed up to Kaly just a few minutes after I called his dad and and told him “…Your son, [RocketScientistGenius] broke into our house…” I played up the whole burglary/criminal aspect like a champ. Man, I shot that poor guy’s Father’s Day all to hell.

Anyway.

All in all, the time away was needed. The Cirque du Soleil experience was good for my soul. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we got to spend an incredible week with Leslie’s sisters and their families (yeah, the in-laws). Did you know 11 people CAN stay together WITHOUT killing one another AND have a great time?! It’s true. I swear.

To God.

~ ~ ~

**Anytime I refer to any functions of that watch, I always say “ON MY WRIST!”. Like, “The barometric pressure is 29.08 millibars ON MY WRIST! The depth of the water is 4.9 feet ON MY WRIST!” The altitude is 128 feet above sea level ON MY WRIST!” Yes, it’s stupid. But at least there’s clarity and it helps validate the purchase of the watch to Leslie.

It’s been a long while since my last real post and all sorts of stuff have happened…

For one, the project that took most of January and February is now complete. It was/is a book. A seventy-something page book, and I swear each page seemed to take eleventy-two hours. I could’ve drawn each page, set the type with a quill and my own blood–serifs included, and the thing would not have taken longer to produce. But now it’s done, “put to bed” so to speak, and it looks gooohooohooood. If I do say so myself.

All sorts of other stuff has happened since as well.

Let’s see…

(deep breath)

Well work is going really good although since the book project slapped a real whammy on the schedule I’ve been working like a freakin’ red-headed stepchild with an inferiority complex trying to catch up and make EVERYBODY happy and in doing so I sorta neglected things around the house, but not really because I pulled the shit together enough to get Kaly her driver’s license which, considering the DMV and their lack of scheduling or any adherence to a schedule I thought the whole “hey kid, congratulations, you’re now a legal driver” sentence would never get uttered from my mouth and quite frankly I thought I was going to have to bring a bed down to the DMV, but anyway she aced the driving test and now she’s cartin’ her own butt around everywhere which you would think would free up JUST LOADS of “Us” time for me and Leslie but that’s not quite the case either considering, but we have had the opportunity to go on an almost “date-like” experience with a friend in from out of town wherein I proceeded to show my man boobs when the wait staff commenced to singing me “Happy Birthday” in Italian, but hey it was my birthday and they (meaning Leslie and Theresa) wanted to embarrass me by getting them to sing HBD2 Me so I figured showing of one’s man mamms was totally appropriate especially if there was alcohol involved and speaking of my manly boobly chest I wound up having some sort of freaky chest pains back around the latter part of January and mentioned it to Leslie, of course mentioning anything like this to Les gets the whole Chinese firedrill started which in turn puts me on a treadmill in a cardiologist’s office and as you probably guessed by now I TOTALLY pussed out on the treadmill which caused the doctor great alarm to which she sent me to two other doctors before deciding to schedule me in for a heart cath next week, yes, a heart cath on ME and yes I’m only 42 years old, I turned 42 on Valentines day the same day we found out my dad has cancer and needed surgery but the eensy-beensy complication to this is he had to have a heart cath because he has been having chest pains too, well they did the cath but and in doing so they decided to put off the whole cancer surgery gig until they can thicken up his blood oh and speaking of shitty situations turning shittier, I had a large case of the flu which I’m just now, this week, getting over– the flu thing was an ugly muthuh that I simply had to work through because I couldn’t take any time off since I had the book project and resulting backlog of other work, well yes I’m sure taking the time off would’ve made things better sooner but I stammered through it like any REAL man would and speaking of stammering, Bigg got SERIOUSLY pissed off the other day because I took him to the Doggy Day Spa (they’ll turn your hound into a Village People-esque Poodle) and they chopped him up really bad and even put a bow on him, he got so pissed off that he decided to take his anger out on me as I was coming down the stairs in a fever-induced stupor, the damned dog stuck out his paw and tripped me (on the stairs), which of course sent me– arms flailing down the steps and breaking my big toe, my index toe and my bird toe on my left foot, (SON. OF. A. BITCH.) thankfully I love the dog, and I have a forgiving heart, otherwise I would’ve filleted and grilled him and thrown a Bigg Steak Party for several of my closest friends, I hear a good Merlot goes well with Grilled Terrier, so anyway other downer stuff includes: losing my cell phone, (if you can believe this…) dealing with a heavy case of the blues, insomnia, dealing with Bigg’s anaconda-sized turds since he’s decided he’s “…just not really into the whole house-training thing…“(yes, those are his words) oh and should I not mention Bigg has worms due to his steady diet of the neighbor’s cat’s crap, and also not to mention not one– but two flat tires within a week of one another.

I sound like things are really in the crapper, but there have been some bright spots over the past few weeks, granted it’s all relative, but I consider them bright all the same. We got new furniture (that’s really more of Leslie’s bright spot). They Found Jesus. We got a new tv. American Idol AND Survivor are on (Leslie’s bright spots again) I got nominated for some awards. I got a new cellphone (camera phone even). Things are going really good around the office, and at home.

I’m not complaining.

(Pardon the run on sentence. Mrs. Seney, my 10th grade English teacher would be so upset).